A Collapse of Horses: A Collection of Stories

By Brian Evenson

A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose “can be soul-shaking” (New Yorker).
 
 “Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable” (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson’s seventeen stories in this collection “evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review).
 
Whether it’s a stuffed bear’s heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won’t stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he “doesn’t shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over” (Electric Lit).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781566894142

Brian Evenson

Called "one of the world's foremost authors of books about programming" by International Developer magazine, best-selling author Brian Evenson has written about programming for over three decades. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been widely translated. Brian is interested in all facets of computing, but his primary focus is computer languages. He is the author of numerous books on Java, C, C++, Python etc. Brian holds BA and MCS degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign.

Reviews for A Collapse of Horses

[sunil_kumar-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What I like about Evenson's stories are his commingling of cinematic sensibilities with the moodiness of weird fiction. The awareness being displayed here, with most stories being a twist on the familiar horror tale is delightful. They're all written in a way that only Evenson could've written and the callbacks to the stories within the collection and also from his other collections made me giddy.

[brandiec-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars, rounded up (generously) to 4 starsI always think I'm going to like Brian Evenson's short stories more than I actually do. As an author, Evenson ought to be one of my favorites: winner of the ALA Best Horror Novel and International Horror Guild awards, finalist for the Edgar and Shirley Jackson awards. It may be significant that all of these honors derived from his novels The Open Curtain and Last Days, as I tended to prefer the longer stories in this collection. In fact, my top five included the two longest stories: "The Dust," a classic science fiction tale, at 33 pages and "Click," the 21 pages of which could have made a terrific Twilight Zone episode.Rounding out my top five were "The Punish," about revenge; "A Collapse of Horses," in which the reader is trapped inside a collapsing mind; and "Bearheart™," which would fit quite nicely on the creepy toy shelf with Stephen King's "The Monkey." Other influences include Franz Kafka, who could easily have been the author of "A Report." What made this collection only somewhat-better-than-average for me was the same thing that bothered Goodreads reviewer Figgy, whose words I have taken the liberty of borrowing: "These stories don't have a solid resolution, leaving it up to the reader to decide, but often to a point where this reader was left wondering what the point of many of them even was." Maybe this uncertainty was "the point," but I like my horror to rest on more solid ground.This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.